Tenderizing Steak the MythBuster Way

by Michael Y. Park

on 08/07/08 at 02:43 PM

If you're a fan of the Discovery series MythBusters as well as Epicurious, you'll appreciate this week's episode, in which Adam and Jamie try to find out whether it's possible to tenderize steaks with ... you guessed it ... explosives.

After a quick primer on why some cuts of meat are tougher than others, and more traditional methods of tenderizing, the dynamite-wielding duo use the supersonic shockwaves from explosives to break up the connective tissue in tough meat, along with several other things, as usual. They take cuts of select beef, put them into vacuum-sealed bags that go into a barrel of water, then explode them with various levels of explosives.

The first result, with lots of C4, of course, looks more like corned-beef hash than beef tenderloin.

No. 2, with a less powerful explosive, shreds the plastic barrel but leaves the vacuum-sealed bag intact. No. 3 involves putting a steel plate at the bottom of the barrel and suspending the plastic barrel in midair with high explosives.

The control steaks include a select cut of meat that hasn't been blown up, a select cut that's been treated with the conventional meat tenderizer you find in bottles at the supermarket, and a piece of aged prime steak.

The problem is that a taste test (with the help of Ron Siegel, the first American chef to win Japanese Iron Chef) is inconclusive, so they naturally end up blowing more stuff up. After yet more explosions and bizarre contraptions, and the elimination of the variability of human tastes and the tenderness of steaks from different animals, the results are in, and they're conclusive:

Blowing up your steak, sticking it in a dryer full of ball bearings, or shooting it through a 40-foot air cannon definitely makes it more tender. Also, sticking your steak in a dryer full of ball bearings overnight will ruin your dryer.

Which doesn't help any backyard cooks without access to high explosives and a bomb range, but certainly does open up a new avenue for well-connected chefs who want to make a splash. Who wouldn't want to go to Jamie's Cannon-Fired Steak?

Now if I could only find a convincing argument for the need for an explosives budget ....

I'm so glad you posted on this. I, too, love Mythbusters and have watched it from the beginning. But my ranting and raving about their repeated references to pineapple enzymes rather than papaya enzymes as a main ingredient in commercial tenderizers was totally lost on my non-culinary husband. I just had to get it out to someone who might understand my grumblings about a minuscule food detail on an entertaining non-foodcentric show.

crazycook2
06:25:03 PM on
08/07/08

Those guys are crazy! Think i'll stick to the grill and keep my eyebrows.